Because it's a holiday - or perhaps just because - I'm taking a break from WWI and reading the new bio of Martha Gellhorn.
It's not the book I should have written, thank God. (When Brian originally pointed out the review of this book in the newspaper last fall, I almost cried, for the work I haven't done.) What it IS is a meticulously researched yet still highly readable portrait of a not terribly likeable woman.
I'm not sure I could write biography. One the one hand, you have to be objective and avoid romanticizing your subject or rationalizing his/her behavior. On the other hand, I think you really have to LIKE your subject and feel sympathy for him/her. That makes your portrait unique and artistic, rather than a dry recitation of facts that any good researcher could find and organize. I suppose it's the same thing they advise about fiction: your readers WANT to like the characters; give them some reasons to do so.
If I am going to rewrite my essay on Gellhorn, I need to be clearer about the reasons for selecting such a narrow (chronologically) body of work. I chose it because I thought it was the best of her work - but what does "best" mean? What are my implicit criteria? Then, what are the theoretical underpinnings of my dimly perceived connection between reportage and fiction? If lived life is the grist of the fiction mill, how does the grinding process work? How have scholars theorized it? Then last, pitching this work semi-commercially implies a different introduction than what one would write for a journal. It has to introduce, to be highly readable, not too extra-referential.
The experiential plays into it, so my planned reading of Tuan - and wherever that leads, probably back to phenomenology, which ties possibly to thing-theory (more of that anon) - is right on target. Although - this may be one of those cases in which, if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Everything is experiential and about things, yes?
Susan Sontag wrote an interesting essay on the Iraq prison photos for the NYT magazine last Sunday, which I just had the opportunity to read last night. Her main point is that there are deep structural (and, I would argue, moral) problems in our military, our government, and even our society, which result in people of Rush Limbaugh's stripe comparing these military acts to frat-boy hazing, nothing serious, just blowing off steam.
But she raises some other interesting points as well. First, Bush and senior administration officials were outraged AT THE PHOTOS, NOT THE ACTS THEY REPRESENTED. Second, photos are a more insistent form of documentation than evanescent words. On this second point (I'll come back to the first one in a moment): our culture doesn't value the spoken word, and our vernacular is evidence of this: "It's only her word against his." "Get it in writing." It's why you have to repeat instructions to tenth graders five times - they didn't listen the first four. Or they listened but they've already forgotten.
In cultures where there isn't a written language, oral tradition is obviously much more important, and people know how to listen and to remember. We don't have that, so it's easy to dismiss on-air words; it's the photos that are taken seriously.
Why, though, especially now in the digital age, should photos be so privileged as pristine documentation, as archive, when the circumstances of the shooter's point of view, how the image is cropped, and how it is subsequently digitally changed are all so critical? And this is to say nothing of WHO has digital cameras, and WHY, and what access they have to the means to manipulate, reproduce, and distribute the photos.
Back to the first point. On first hearing, a few weeks ago, I just assumed that the photos were just a stand-in for the acts, in a rather conventional figure of speech. Thus outrage at the photos really meant outrage at the acts they represented. But Sontag seems to see something more sinister - a slippage of metonymy in which the photo does NOT represent the act but rather is disengaged from it, and therefore outrage at one does NOT imply outrage at the other.
I wonder if there is a relationship in this to what I wrote about in the Flanders fields entry, in which the language of poetics is employed to describe trauma. The latter I saw first as a necessary psychological distancing and second as an attempt to use "special" (ie, not everyday) language to convey how important it was to talk about the trauma. On the flip side, to take Sontag's view, the poetics and the metonymy could be ways to dissociate and absolve and compartmentalize and even trivialize. That's the danger - and it would be wise to be aware of it in writing further about war.
(I just reread this entry and got a creepy feeling of deja vu. Obviously these processes of symbol-making, figuration, and transference are all very important. Sigh. A lifetime of reading about them.)
Yesterday I learned that my former boss, of 15 years, has cancer. I haven't called him yet - because the news was in the hometown paper he's probably deluged with phone calls at the moment - but I wrote a letter and told him I'll call next week.
I don't have a good feeling about this. I think he's been sick for awhile.
I owe him a lot - but at a cost. Working for him, especially in the high-profile job that I had, intensified all my lifelong feelings of insecurity about not "measuring up." Working in the public eye is like acting, to some extent: as soon as I stepped out of my car to walk toward the building, I'd have to remember to step briskly and confidently, head high, full of faked vigor instead of the usual early morning exhaustication. Once he pulled me aside for a fatherly pep talk about never admitting aloud to being tired - "it drags down your staff and makes them think they can slack." So much for authenticity of self.
When he stepped down, things were more relaxed, but the old drive and discipline had actually been essential in getting things done, and under the new regime that hasn't been a priority.
Now, in my current albeit part-time job I get lots of accolades and little oversight, and I know that I am not being judged by the same impossibly high standards that I worked under for so long. It is a relief - but it feels like cheating.
Meanwhile, back in 1914: dry, bloodless tales of impossible losses at Charleroi and Mons. No one knows the future except perhaps Kitchener. I still think of Fort de Loncin at Liege, and it haunts me. "Why haunting? Why now?" asks cultural geographer Karen Till. I don't know the answer, but I'd like to spend some time this summer finding it out.
PS: "untitled" is the stupidest title ever. If its title is "untitled," then it isn't untitled, is it??
I am on break from painting the bathroom while someone else uses that room for a time. That is, I've washed all the walls and woodwork (hateful task) and am ready to open the can of paint we bought yesterday, Champagne Blush or some such thing.
I haven't used Behr paint before - I've been a Sherwin Williams girl for years - so we'll see how it is. It's a couple of dollars cheaper than SW, but that might just be the Home Despot factor.
It is very relaxing to paint in a rental apartment where you can be a little more relaxed about prep and coverage and detailing. The summer I was 13, we painted thousands of square miles of walls in our new house (I may exaggerate the smallest bit). My father is a stickler for paint prep, and if we were too quick about coming out to his shop saying we were ready to paint, he'd inspect our prep work and send us back for more scrubbing and sanding. So we evolved a strategy: scrub and sand, then chill and watch TV for a half-hour or so, then go tell him we were ready to paint. He'd inspect and be satisfied, because we would have taken, at least in his mind, an appropriate amount of time to do the job.
Ah, it's good to be a grownup.
The walls are quite rough, and my guess is that the last painter used a roller, and not too successfully. I'll get better coverage with my brush. Some habits die hard, if at all.
Before that, I worked at school for four hours and then walked home. B. called up to change the address on his mother's bank account and said it took half an hour. I don't think Fleet has offshored yet - but perhaps they would get better results if they did. The bank name is clearly a cruel irony - there's nothing suggesting celerity about their customer service reps. At all.
(I was hoping for celeritous but Webster's doesn't have it, no adjective form listed. Too lazy to try OED.)
This morning, I proctored an exam for one of the college prep companies at one of the private schools in the suburbs . Twenty-two kids, mostly boys, all with more interesting things to do than take a three-hour exam. At least it was raining, so their other options weren't as broad-ranging.
I can tell I've reached a certain age, because the phrase "kids these days" keeps springing unbidden to mind. They can't sit still; even during the exam itself feet were tapping and twitching, pencils were drumming. And once they'd finished a section and had to wait for the next one to start, the boredom for that five or so minutes must have been unbearable. Thus began the round of snacking, pointless trips to the bathroom, playing GameBoy (or whatever its high school analog is), poking and punching and kicking each other.
These are kids of the Consumer Age, who are used to having wants immediately and fully gratified. One kid wanted to work ahead, which isn't allowed in order to simulate actual test conditions. He said he had to leave early to go to work (later this turned out to be a golf game) and he was pretty miffed that he couldn't take the test in the manner he wanted. I wasn't supposed to let them leave until the test was over, but I did, just to preserve some modicum of order for the remainder.
B. says the nuns probably don't have any trouble keeping order. I doubt that - even he mouthed off to nuns, and that was a generation ago. But when you work for a company that is selling services and trying to please kids' parents, you don't have the same authority to play tyrant in the classroom as a regular instructor. I'm even chary of my bent toward sarcasm.
As I was reading, at the same time, about boys only a few years older being mowed down by the millions in France, the self-preoccupation and lack of self-discipline of these boys really grated. They can't even know how good their lives are!
But I do wonder - and have wondered for a long time - if putting kids in desks and trying to get them to be quiet and docile is just the wrong model for public education. It probably was good discipline for a lifetime of boredom working on an assembly line, but those aren't the kinds of jobs that are available by the millions any more. How do you teach interactive, engaged, but respectful behavior in the classroom? I want to do more of that when I next teach, so it bears further thought.
What's the right height to hang a picture on the wall? B and I hung less than half our pictures today: very complicated, lots of measuring and math and drawing on the walls (in pencil of course - it's erasable). It may be a surprise to those who know me and my obsessive sense of order and logic (ha, who am I kidding?!) but I prefer to eyeball the pictures and just hang them up. B on the other hand prefers to interpose logic between eyeballs and action.
They're too high (his family hangs pictures too high, some sort of genetic flaw) so I'll have to wait til he's out to "adjust" them. Will he notice? The Saturn 5 rocket poster was up for several days before he saw it.
We finally agreed on colors for the kitchen and bath too. No more Band-Aid brown (two different shades, representing two different kinds of Band-Aid products) in the kitchen. Woo hoo! That room has been such a downer - we spend as little time as possible in it.
Oh, and I went to get my hair trimmed yesterday and got it cut short instead. It's still a shock when I catch my image in a mirror or glass door.
So this is the kind of trivia that occupies our brains these days. It's making me remember why I both welcomed and loathed summer vacation as a kid: the illusion of endless freedom is a thrill but there's a lack of structure and purpose that saps one's energy.
Maybe when (if?) it stops raining we will be more motivated. It is to be hoped...
Before and after the day job, I finished All Quiet on the Western Front (spoiler alert: pretty much everyone dies) and started The Guns of August. I'd forgotten that all The Powers were pretty much expecting war from 1910 or so onwards; it was just a question of when.
Although I consider myself over-imaginative, I have trouble imagining the mindset that puts "natural" expansion of one's country over the lives of millions (like, twelve or so) human beings. Even though the Germans expected WWI to last only 39 days (literally: Schlieffen's war plan called for marching up the Champs Elysees on day 39) that's still no excuse for what followed.
How little we learn. The current Administration had a Sturm und Drang strategy too, right? But if it didn't work and there was resistance, there was no plan to deal with THAT, much less the rebuilding of a country and a society. I'd say that Dubya should have to read the bitterest of the war poetry - Sassoon, Owen, the free verse guy whose name I'm forgetting - in a jail cell somewhere until it sinks in. Would it ever?
Our seminar profs noted (in passing, but with bemusement) that those of us who spoke of trauma in our final presentations - the genocide in Rwanda, genocide in general, the devastation of cities such as Dresden - spoke poetically, as if normal academic speech was inappropriate to our purpose. It's going to be a huge challenge for me academically to find the right voice to speak forcefully but persuasively about the moral issues I care about in Geography. I think poetry is a good start - but it unsettles the older generation, who think of Geography as a science, with universal truths that can be extracted by tramping through fields (metaphorically), conducting inquiry according to the prescriptions of scientific method, and dispassionately writing up and publishing those results.
I started reading All Quiet on the Western Front last night and am about 1/3 through it. I have wanted to read it for a couple of years. B and I talked at breakfast about the various movie versions - I may have seen one of them in the WWI class a couple of summers ago, but all the war movies sort of blend together in my mind.
The narrator outlines an idea I've always favored - that wars should be fought by heads of state and their ministers, in a ring, with the peoples of the countries as spectators. Wouldn't THAT appeal to Dubya, with his tough-guy swagger doubtless masking perpetual insecurities?
Anyway Remarque is a warm-up to get back into the spirit of the war - next will be Keegan with a focus on the Eastern front this time. Remarque's characters are all disparaging about the Prussians and I need to learn how that really works geopolitically.
So that's the reading list for the short-term.
I wonder if the Nature and Society thing has already peaked in geography, or if my landscape architecture background makes me a good candidate to get into it a little bit? The NYT magazine has a great theme issue today on landscapes.
Speaking of which - our second floor apartment feels like a treehouse (yeah, I know: how does a treehouse feel?) now that all the urban forest six inches from the house has leafed out. Birds and squirrels galore - some of the birds live in at least two separate nests in the roof structure of the white house next door. I'd be surprised if squirrels haven't gnawed residence into these houses too. Will have to observe....
There was an interesting article by Laura Miller in the NYT Book Review section this past Sunday concerning the question how long you stick with a book before giving up and deciding that you can't - or won't - finish it.
Naturally, the more you "have" to read professionally, the less slack you cut writers. One person was quoted as saying he can pretty much tell by the end of the first sentence whether it's worth it to him to continue.
When I was younger it was a point of pride to finish every book. Not doing so felt as though I hadn't finished my homework, or had left the milk out on the counter, or the back door ajar, or something. Things left unfinished, in other words, nag at the mind.
Now that I've sort of left all that Lutheran clean-plate-club-ness behind, and have become a self-indulgent slacker, I sometimes do not finish books that annoy me. Reading Miller's article reminded me of a few of them:
1. A novel (perhaps American Psycho?) by Bret Easton Ellis that I brought on vacation to Florida one winter and left in the hotel-room drawer (although I should have burned it in the parking lot) because it was so disgusting and violent that it made me ashamed to be a fellow human being. It was better to read nothing than to read that dreck - and since I am ALWAYS reading something, that's a strong statement indeed.
2. Same vacation. A Man In Full, Tom Wolfe. Would it never end? I was up nights with a cold and would have paid a lot of money (THOSE were the glory days!) for anything, but anything else.
3. Having moved to MN and having lots of free time: Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence. I think I was vicariously trying to participate in the seminar in Lawrence and Woolf that I couldn't take because I moved away from the MA English program that I was in. That was the same period in which I read all four volumes of V Woolf's diaries. And LOVED them.
I don't "get" Lawrence. The scene is dreary; the characters depressing. Lawrence constantly tells instead of showing: "So-and-so felt that..." Anyway, I read perhaps 2/3 of it, and then it sat on my bedside table for months while I read other stuff, and then finally I gave in to the inevitable and moved it back into the bookcase.
There's something to be said for life stages though. My eighth grade English teacher, doubtless reliving his own glory days of college, pressed me to read, insisted that I read, Jane Austen. I did - but I didn't really appreciate it despite our delightful tete-a-tetes about the novels. Then I read Mansfield Park last spring and I thought it was unbelievable. Why hadn't I gotten it before? It's to be hoped that I'll have a Lawrence breakthrough at some point.
What to read now? I'm dazzled by the possibilities. Perhaps James's Wings of the Dove? But that's for possible writing purposes. O Pioneers? - same thing. Hmm. More thinking required - I'll do it silently and off line and spare you.
I think B just drove in the driveway so I'll be quick.
I am finished! I took my final this morning - 2 hours of speed-writing - and then came home and graded student work and calculated final grades. I want B to double-check my formulas in the spreadsheet before I post them to the University.
Then I unpacked some boxes of linens. We HAVE to unpack - but in some ways it's extra work, as we might be shifting things around later to paint - especially in the kitchen, which is horrid: two shades of Band-Aid brown. What were they thinking??
Off to enjoy FREEDOM!!
In an entry from April 23 (I'd link you to it if I had a clue how!) I wrote about Hawthorne - and in a letter from Mom that came yesterday I got to think about this again.
The letter (degree 1) said that she was going to a lecture on May 20 by a professor at Penn State (degree 2) who would be speaking on Hawthorne's (degree 3) use in The Scarlet Letter of an anonymous text called The Salem Belle: a Tale of 1692 that he (the prof) thinks was written by Ebenezer Wheelwright (degree 4), a prosperous merchant from my hometown whom my mom and I believe was the builder of the house my grandparents (degree 5) bought in 1945 and my family (degree 6) moved into in 1974.
Totally cool, huh? And most of this happened without the Internet, where even cooler connections can happen due to the "decreasing friction of distance" as we call it in economic geography.
And speaking of which, I must go study for my last final, on that and other selected topics in economic development. Til tomorrow...WHEN I SHALL BE FREE!!!!!
I've heard numerous references to Proust's madeleines this term, as a pointer to various kinds of memories. I've always wanted to read "Recherches.." but have never quite got up the energy. Maybe this summer? - Walter Benjamin was quite enamoured of his work, it appears.
For me, madeleines are cream cheese and olive dip. I had a hankering for some this spring, don't know why, and bought some cream cheese some weeks ago (so as not to gross you out I won't say HOW MANY weeks!) and finally, yesterday, made the dip. (Then I forgot to make a sandwich of it to bring to school today, but that's a different story.)
One bite of this dip on a cracker, and I'm back in my grandmother's kitchen, sitting on a cane-bottomed ladderback chair, having "coffee break," which my father had with my grandmother twice a day all the years she lived there, so about 1945 to 1974 or thereabouts. She'd set out the coffee for my dad and her, and always a plate of crackers and cheese or dip, and milk for whatever grandchild might be trailing along behind my dad. I still have one of the glasses from that set - a little juice glass, purple, with sort of a scumbled, mottled pattern. They'd talk, and I'd eat, as much as I wanted.
My grandmothers were both really cool about food in ways that were special and unusual to us as children. "Oh, have another cracker!" "That doughnut won't be any good tomorrow!" My mother had budgets to meet, so six people meant six chicken thighs. We never went hungry, but there was never a sense that you could eat freely as much as you wanted - the food was all allocated before it ever was set on the table - and if you indulged and had a little extra, that meant someone else would have less.
Now I eat whatever and whenever I want, and it feels like a guilty pleasure if it's not healthy and not at a mealtime. Mom wasn't big on snacks, so my sibs and I evolved certain Euell Gibbons-like practices for foraging through the neighborhood. I can still take a walk through the semi-surburban wilderness and tell you what's good to eat. Maybe this is where my great fondness for native plant communities comes from!
Think about it: what food takes you back in time?
Tomorrow: six degrees of separation.
I'm listening right now to a CD called "Passage" - it's modal music, "the music of the spheres," from 138 BC to 1611 AD. I read about modal music when I was in high school - was totally into music then and dreamed of being a Baroque composer. Yeah, the Dept. of Labor lists THAT as a field with growth potential.
Modal music has different sorts of scales than the do-re-mi we are most familiar with - the half steps fall in different places depending on the mode, and each mode is thought to have a "character" appropriate for certain kinds of emotions. The modes have Greek names like Lydian and Dorian.
The music seems appropriate tonight - the heavens are crackling with lightning and there have been tornado watches all evening. This CD is by the Empire Brass Quintet, but there's a lot of drumming and wordless vocals too - both elemental and cosmic.
I don't get how people can listen to music while they read or write. I can do only one thing at a time (if that).
Two papers due tomorrow. It's probably time to give up the music and get to work.
My neighbor, who has some, um, unconventional ideas about urban forestry, has some kind of weed tree growing about 2 mm from our driveway, and this morning, backing down in a sleep-deprived fog, I caught the rear-view mirror assembly square on, and smashed it to bits.
The tree is fine, btw. I hope they can replace the whole assembly without too much trouble. Driving to school, I kept glancing in the now-nonexistent rear view to check my left side. I suppose I can get used to driving without it, but it's probably illegal, although MN is pretty liberal about those sorts of things.
For example, it's perfectly legal to do electrical wiring in your own home, and in a duplex if it is owner-occupied. (Little things you learn teaching legal issues in construction.) In MA this could never be allowed (although people do it all the time).
That little crash snapped me out of my ozone layer long enough to drive to school and get through the first meeting, but I started to space out in the second, then forgot totally about a third, and came home to finish my big seminar paper, which B and I drove to my professor's house an hour or so ago.
Woo-hoo! Well, actually, I'm a little less sanguine than that. If I could have a couple of weeks to think about the topic and do some selected rereading, the paper could probably be improved a great deal. But I just had to force myself to stop micro-managing every comma and just get it done.
This weekend I plan to write the two papers that are due on Monday, and then I'll be able to spend Monday and Tuesday reviewing for the Public Affairs final. Looking at the study questions, I feel as though I've retained nothing.
In general, that's how I feel. I have only the most general, superficial, and probably erroneous notion of the vast amount of reading I've done this term. It was a skim-and-get-the-gist sort of affair, all semester long.
Hey, I just realized that we get almost FOUR months off. Summer is essentially 1/3 of the year, and it's all FREE TIME. THAT certainly calls for a woo and a hoo!
Oh. "Weed tree" is legit plant talk. It's a tree that no one wants, because it grows too fast, or drips stuff, or tends to break off and fall on cars/people/houses, or can't be killed, or reproduces itself faster than rabbits. My first car was a station wagon, and it was a tree MAGNET. I could be driving down the parkway on a perfectly sunny, calm day, and boom, a limb would fall down and crash on the roof.
I think B fell asleep in the big chair while grading. Maybe instead of another glass of wine we should just go to bed.
Til tomorrow....
I guess it would be boring if every blog entry had the title "exhausticated," huh?
Damn. Well, I'm beyond that now, working toward comatose. It's 10:30; I got in bed, but my brain was still firing on several circuits, so I figured I could at least check the mail and update.
I passed my French exam tonight!!! Considering I did little homework and infrequently attended class, this is a gift from the gods, indeed! Put another check in the box on the big list of PhD requirements.
Also today I gave my final presentation in seminar. Seemed to go ok. I felt all emotional about the war-and-death thing (my usual themes) but the presentation was clear and had a beginning-middle-end (unlike some of the others) and the visuals were good.
Tomorrow I grade papers and write lecture notes for the last class, and oh yeah, write a 7-minute presentation for the methods class. And interview a guy about the future of geography. Just the usual fun-filled Wednesday.
I LOVE being almost finished with this semester. 8 more days. I am gonna do NOTHIN' for several days thereafter, just to see what it feels like.
Well, Friday we packed all day, and yesterday we moved.
We had movers, of course. Nevertheless, my upper arms and calves are still sore from moving stuff down a flight of stairs into the cars, and up a flight of stairs into the new apartment. (When you are paying by the hour and you are as frugal/cheap as I am, there's a little extra incentive to help the movers finish up the job.) I figure I was up and down stairs about 100 times over the course of the day. No big deal for someone in shape - but a major event for a couch spud like myself.
This apartment is even nicer than I remember its being. There are so many rooms that I keep getting disoriented. And B and I can be a lot further apart here. Sometimes that's good - like now, when he thinks I'm working like a fiend on the papers due Tuesday but I'm actually just "wasting time" updating the blog while he watches TV so far away that I can't even hear it.
It is so quiet here that we had to install the stereo just to get some ambient noise. I complained constantly about the noise at the prior apartment, and I don't miss the constant awareness of my neighbors' every move and conversation (yeah, the soundproofing was THAT good), but the quiet is oddly disconcerting.
It's difficult to live in the world of cardboard boxes. Given my current workload and abiding procrastination, it is so seductive to think about unpacking them and getting this place all clean and organized. But no - international cities call. The papers on Atlanta and eastern Europe are both due on Tuesday, followed by the French exam. Then Wednesday, a presentation on a topic for which I've done no work since I handed in the first draft in early April. Possibly late March, come to think of it.
Next fall: less coursework, more thinking. Amazingly, though, the "powers" in my department thus far have been sucked in by the superficial overachieving of "take lots of courses, get decent grades" (but don't actually engage with the material. THAT chicken might be coming home to roost with the eastern Europe paper - time will tell.)
Ah, if only this department would go to pass-fail in service of greater learning and less grade-grubbing, as a famous East Coast university has done in their design school. There was still a hierarchy, and we still knew who the stars were and who the people in trouble were, but the rest of us could relax and focus on learning, rather than trying to anticipate the quixotic nature of our professors' next design thrill.
More on Thursday.